


When the World Went Dark, Darling, We Turned On the Light

by HelloInternet (IronicAppreciation)



Category: Game Grumps
Genre: ??? If I'm feeling nice lol, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Descriptive imagery, F/M, Family Dynamics, Feelings, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Love, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-08 16:58:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17390165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronicAppreciation/pseuds/HelloInternet
Summary: There's something about living after life has stopped. Something that changes you. Sometimes for the better.Oftentimes for the worse.But we get through it. We fight tooth and nail to survive when dying is easier. We always have. We always will.That's just what humans do.A spinoff of CustardBattle's "Finding Some Kind of Normal". Your standard zombie apocalypse scenario. Highly recommended that you read the original piece first, but this could technically be understood as a standalone. Focuses on characters and relationships not explored in as much depth as others in the first story, because I'm a sucker for being unoriginal and talentless. This might end up gayer than intended, like everything else I write, but that's not really a surprise, now is it?





	1. Living

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Finding Some Kind of Normal](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11716293) by [CustardBattle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CustardBattle/pseuds/CustardBattle). 



> This is the literally the first RPF I've written, ever. I generally tend to hate them and always fear misrepresenting a real, living person, but this AU was too incredible not to fall in love with. I had such a great time reading, which I wasn't expecting, since I had literally been looking up youtuber porn with my friends to laugh at and came upon this by pure happenstance. The original work is so so so well written, please check it out!

Arin had been adamantly against the idea from the very start.

“No. Absolutely _not._ That's, like, an eight day trip just to _get_ there. Nuh-uh. _Nope._ You are _not_ leaving this place for sixteen days. No. Fucking. _Way._ ”

That's what he had said, and that had been the end of it, because Arin was a grownup, and Matt was just a dumb teenager who didn't know any better than to want to help other people at his own expense. He was lionhearted and reckless and too good for his own good, so _of course_ he’d make up a plan to rescue the villagers living some eighty miles upstream even if it meant putting himself at risk. He was young and he was bold, and he thought that being young and bold made him downright invincible.

It was a dangerous delusion. One that left him the day Kevin died.

Matt had still been sixteen, then. Kevin only twenty-one. As the youngest of the refugees taking shelter at the Greenway House School for boys, the two were often paired up for safe, simple tasks assigned to them in shifts. Dish duty, quick supply runs, tidying up bathrooms and bedrooms throughout the dormitory, night watch, etcetera. Back then, when the reckoning had only just begun, they were still making trips outside school grounds during the daytime, frequently. They had to learn the hard way what a risky game that was.

The morning of Kevin’s death had been just like any other. Everyone woke up at 7, as per Suzy and Dan’s established meal schedule, and by 8 a.m, breakfast had been finished. As Vernon and Arin took up washing the plates, Suzy approached the boys, who were seated quietly in the mess hall, to give them their daily chores. Kevin’s eyes were shut and his legs were draped over the side of the couch, but he wasn’t sleeping, and Matt was halfheartedly thumbing through a worn copy of _Othello_ that he had been reading for school and had never gotten the chance to finish.

“Hey, guys,” Suzy started amiably. Back then, she was still wearing a full face of makeup every day, and her hair was always impeccable. She looked every bit as flawless as she had before the world around them had gone to shit, and practically _emanated_ alacrity, even in the worst of times. It was a small comfort, but it was a comfort nonetheless, and they didn’t get much of _that_ anymore.

“So, since it’s gonna be getting cold out soon, we wanted to stock up on all the winter-y supplies we might need heading into December, you know, in case the heating goes to hell,” she sat down on the coffee table, continuing to speak as she produced a folded piece of paper from within her shirt’s breast pocket. “There’s this old cabin nearby that Vernon and Dan found last time they went out, and they said it wasn’t all stripped down yet. It’s only an hour’s trek away, so it shouldn’t be _too_ big of an issue for you two and your useless chicken legs.”

Kevin pretended to be offended as she handed him the paper, which, when unfolded, turned out to be a crude, hastily illustrated map of the surrounding area scribbled out in blue ink--no doubt Dan’s handiwork, if the borderline illegible handwriting was anything to go by.

“Y’know _what_ , Suz?” Kevin looked at her scathingly as Matt picked himself up to sit on the side of the loveseat that had before been occupied by the former’s aforementioned chicken legs, “not all of us can be buff _and_ beautiful, okay? Most of the time, you only get to pick one. It’s not our fault that you’re, like, a freak of nature.”

Peering over the older man’s shoulder, Matt glanced at the atrocious penmanship affronting the piece of paper laid out in Kevin’s lap, trying to make sense of it. It was straightforward enough, once you managed to decipher the chicken scratch, and featured a big “YOU ARE HERE” sign scrawled where the school was located, with a smiley face doodled next to it.

Yup. _Definitely_ Dan.

“Shame you ended up being _neither,_ then,” Suzy quipped back with a smile, and Kevin snorted, sitting up straighter and refolding Dan’s map, shoving it into the pocket of his hoodie and carding a hand through his hair.

“So, what, you want us to, like, go out and get you blankies?” he asked, leaning forward and placing his elbows on his knees.

“Essentially, yeah,” Suzy replied, “blankets, quilts, sweaters, coats, socks, boots. Anything that'll keep us from freezing to death in the next few months.”

So Matt and Kevin got dressed and headed out beyond the gates, careful to avoid agitating the lingerers loitering around the school from the last passing horde. Matt was responsible for navigating them, and Kevin trailed a few feet behind him, wielding a handgun and making sure they were keeping safe. They made it to the cabin in an hour, just as Suzy had said they would, and while the woman had been, for the most part, being facetious when she was teasing about the boys’ lethargy, Matt’s legs were aching to high hell by the time they crept through the open window on the first floor bedroom of the old, allegedly abandoned house.

He was utterly exhausted, in part because of the walk, and in part because he had had a bit of trouble sleeping the night before, but had withheld that information from Suzy when she’d asked him if he was up for the trip, because he had wanted to prove that he was every bit as capable and helpful as the adults were.

And, maybe, if he’d had more energy that day, or if he hadn’t neglected to tell someone about just how tired he was, he’d have paid more attention to where he was standing.

Maybe he wouldn’t have leaned against the master bedroom wardrobe, which, unbeknownst to him, served as a makeshift coffin for the undead corpse of the woman who’d once owned the place.

Maybe he’d have noticed the distressed, moaning noises coming from behind the old wooden door, which just so _happened_ to be a couple inches ajar.

Maybe he wouldn’t have opted to catch his breath _just_ close enough to the gap in the closet for the late woman’s bony, grappling hand to catch hold of him in her festering, rotten grasp.

For the second time that year, Matt’s whole life ended in a matter of moments.

He didn’t even register himself screaming over the searing pain of her overgrown nails piercing through the flesh of his upper arm, digging into his skin and pulling him into a cold, dead embrace, her lifeless breath falling on the nape of his neck as she poised herself to take a bite out of her newfound snack.

For a split second, Matt almost thought he heard her whisper. Almost thought he heard her mutter something in his ear, something that sounded faintly like a broken, barely-there _“I’m sorry.”_

And then the gun went off, and Matt heard nothing.

In the few seconds that followed where he collapsed to ground, deafened and stunned, and where Kevin was so damn frightened that he’d just accidentally shot his _friend_ instead of the monster trying to make a meal out of him, the lady’s husband sauntered his way into the room from God knows where to avenge her death.

Kevin never even stood a chance. His back was turned, and he was too focused on shouting Matt’s name, trying to elicit a response, to notice what was right behind him. The old man, pus dribbling from his mouth as though he were salivating, took hold of his shoulder and bit right down into his scalp.

When the ringing in Matt’s head died down enough for him to remember where he was, Kevin’s face had already been mauled beyond recognition, a ghost of the pain and panic he’d felt in his final moments still etched on his pallid skin, haunting his lifeless features.

In the end, Suzy didn’t get the blankets she’d asked for.

Things changed after that wretched, detestable day. It was the first time they’d ever lost someone, and they never really forgave themselves for it. Arin seemed to age a year within a matter of minutes when he heard the news. Dan found himself plagued by nightmares evening after evening. Vernon forbade them all from going out during the day again under any circumstances, unless their safety at the school had been compromised. Suzy wrought herself with hideous sobs whenever she thought no one could hear.

And Matt stopped taking care of himself. He just. _Stopped._

He locked himself away in his room for nearly a month, refused meals, didn’t sleep, drove himself half to death trying to cope with what he’d seen, with what he’d _done._ He was a killer, he decided, point blank. Kevin would still be alive if it hadn’t been for him. He served as judge, jury, and executioner to his own sentence, and if Dan and Arin hadn’t intervened eventually, he may well have just wasted away, wallowing in his own guilt and grief.  

That had been a little over two years ago.

After that, Arin and Matt didn’t talk about Matt’s idea again, and the whole thing was forgotten. Was disregarded and rejected because Arin had been right, because it really _had_ been too dangerous a plan.

Matt didn’t even remember it, didn’t think of it again for nearly a whole year and a half.

Until one day, when Suzy came back from a supply run with two survivors, scragglers she had found wandering a little ways away from the school. One had been shorter and, despite the haggardness of his appearance, remarkably enthusiastic about meeting the others. The other was younger, and more closed off, but not unkind, offering polite smiles and gratuitous thank you’s to whoever spoke to him.

Most surprising, though, was the fact that Arin and the short guy seemed to know each other.

As it turned out, the other man--Mark was his name--had worked at the school, too, and he and some of his friends had been trying to find it when they’d run into Suzy. They’d been in a larger group, but had gotten separated after making it past the freeway. Mark and the other dude, Ryan, were the only ones that had managed to stick together. Mark kept hope that the others would turn up, eventually.

They never did.

It was no wonder, then, that Ryan seemed a bit dejected those first few weeks. Who knew how many friends he’d lost, how many people he’d loved that he would now never see again.

Matt had only barely survived losing _one._

Still, despite the heavy-heartedness of the situation, as well as the added burden of more mouths to feed, it wasn’t all bad. Evidently, Mark held the keys to a portion of the school that had been locked off from everyone but upper faculty members, for security purposes. The day after the two arrived and got settled, he opened up the doors to the east wing of the building, and together, the seven inhabitants of Greenway spent a solid week exploring all the rooms and supplies they’d been denied access to before. Ryan, who was nineteen at the time and had only _just_ graduated when the future he’d been working towards was ripped away from him, was paired up with Matt and given charge of scouring the second level classrooms for anything that could be put to use. The situation would’ve been painfully familiar if it wasn’t so exhilarating being in a change of scenery for once, and if Ryan wasn’t such an unabashedly amazing guy.

That night at dinner, Dan joked to Matt that if he kept ogling at the new kid so much, he’d turn himself gay. Matt laughed him off, which really only egged the other man on.

He didn’t care. For the first time in what felt like forever, Matt was actually excited about something. About _someone._

That boldness and recklessness that had never quite left him--had only been temporarily scared into hiding--resurfaced as he spent day after day sculpting the first friendship he would make after the world had come to an end. Ryan brought out the best in him, and Matt _prayed_ to a god he’d damn near stopped believing in that the feeling was mutual.

Inevitably, unsurprisingly, they fell into an unbreakable rhythm. They became inseparable. Suzy gushed that it was _“meant to be”_ , and honestly? Matt agreed. Their dynamic became so strong, it was hard to spend too much time apart. Matt forgot what life was like before Ryan, and he didn’t want to remember. Somehow, someway, he was happier now than he ever remembered being. Even with life crumbling to a halt, grinding to a standstill all around them, he looked forward to waking up each and every morning.

He wasn’t just a survivor anymore. He was living.

He felt alive again.

It was only a matter of time until that unbridled aliveness presented a dilemma.


	2. Falling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be the worst thing I've ever written. WHOOPS

Mark had only known the majority of these people for a few days, but if anything were ever to happen to any of them, he might just kill everyone left alive in this miserable, broken bone of a world they lived in out of pure, unadulterated rage. And he considered himself a pretty nonviolent person, too. _That’s_ how big an impression the survivors at Greenway had had on him.

There was Suzy, who he’d never met in the years he and Arin had worked together, but who he’d heard _so much_ about. Mark vividly remembered the exact moment she’d introduced herself to him and Ryan, scrambling out of the foliage of the forest and right to their rescue. He remembered the sorrow that washed over him when he recognized the name and recalled the life he’d lost. Never in a million years would he have imagined that the woman standing before him was the same Suzy as the one his coworker had babbled about so adoringly so many times before. The one he’d used as a tool to make fun of his old friend on account of how intolerably enamored Arin was with her. The one Arin had _sworn_ to introduce him to one day, the one Arin had promised Mark would _“absolutely LOVE”._ The one he’d never gotten the chance to see when she was still the woman Arin had described, still lively and enterprising and just as dorky as her husband. The one he met only after the apocalypse had left her a husk of the person she used to be.

Life was funny like that, sometimes. Funny and unfair.

But. There were things that even the literal end of the world couldn’t poison. And when Mark finally _did_ get to know the woman about whom Arin had gushed for years on end, she was everything he had said she would be and then some. She was tough as nails and sweet as sugar. She was fun and strong and mean in a way that made you feel special, like her brand of friendly berating was somehow a secret sort of compliment.

Mark had been doing the dishes with her one day shortly after his arrival when she’d asked about how he’d gotten to the school. Without warning, Mark had launched into a dramatic tale about his treacherous journey to the campus, revealing all his plights and his woes, all his losses and his triumphs. She’d listened intently, taking care not to interrupt, and for once, telling the sad story of his survival hadn’t felt like such a fucking chore. Sometime during his reenactment of an encounter he’d had with a small horde just outside of his old city, however, Mark dropped one of the plates he’d been clutching in his sudsy hands and shattered it. Suzy had called him _“a bumbling buffoon!”_ then, and had gone to quickly clean up the glass pieces before _“one of the other useless idiots”_ stepped on the shards and sliced open their feet.

That had shocked Mark into an uncharacteristic silence, partly because he didn’t think anyone in the world--or, rather, what was left of it--actually used the word _“buffoon”_ in real life, but mostly because seconds after yelling at him, Suzy resumed washing up and chatting affably with him, as cheerily as though nothing had happened.

Confused and feeling somewhat as though everything that had transpired had occurred in his head and he was going totally insane, Mark had relayed the events of the afternoon to Arin and Dan later that day. They’d shared a single, soundless glance, then, and immediately _erupted_ into a fit of laughs. When they were quite finished _giggling_ as Mark sat between them in bewildered silence, Arin waved him off, telling him,

“Don’t worry, man. Suzy’s just _like_ that.”

And he was right. Suzy _was_ just _like that._ She smacked Matt _hard_ upside the head whenever he tried to weasel his way out of a chore. She made Arin sleep on the couch when he did something stupid or unsafe that pissed her off. She threatened Dan and Vernon with _physical harm_ if they made jokes she didn’t find tasteful. Once Mark even heard her telling Ryan off for not making his bed in the morning, as though he were a trouble child in need of disciplining and not a grown young man she’d only just met.

But, in spite of her oftentimes overbearing personality and unashamed strictness, she was soft on her boys. She stayed up in Matt’s room with him when he’d wake up in the middle of the night in terrified tremors because _“he’s dead. He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, oh god, Suzy, I killed him, I fucking_ killed _him.”_ She made unequivocally sure to kiss her husband every time one of them came back from a venture outside the school’s gates, even if they were in the middle of a fight, because they both privately knew that any kiss might very well be their last. She held Dan’s hand and cracked jokes with him whenever he was afraid, and she never failed to compliment Vernon’s cooking, no matter how bland the meal in question might’ve been. She hosted mandatory game nights and made eyeliner out of charcoal, because there was no reason that the end of the world should also mean the end of life as they knew it. She kept them tight-knit and well-organized--every bit as close and functional as a family ought to be.

She was the first person Ryan opened up to about Daniel.

And Mark loved her for that. Loved her for being strong for them when they couldn’t be strong for themselves. Loved her for being there no matter what.

Which, of course, led him right along his list of awestruck admiration to Dan and Arin, who were more so the definition of unconditional than that which the dictionary might ever be able to denote. They didn’t let some pesky, insignificant thing like the actual apocalypse throw a wrench in their plans. Not even armageddon itself could stop them from being who they were and doing what they loved.

From what Mark had gathered, Dan had been a massive music geek back before he became a full time survivor--had even sung in a band. And he sung, still, despite the fact that said band was most likely long since dead. He held personal concerts in the shower and would spontaneously serenade Vernon whenever he was particularly hungry or excited about what was being cooked. He’d riff randomly during conversations and, after Mark unlocked the hall leading to the school’s orchestra chamber, he spent hours upon hours fucking around in there, plucking absent-minded tunes on dusty cellos and making a racket on every percussion instrument he recognized. It was annoying as hell, seeing that the sound carried through as far as the main entrance, but no one said anything, because he was happy. He was satisfied spending his every waking hour locked away in a crappy high school band room, ignoring the way the world was rotting all around him. More cynical men might’ve called it delusion or disillusionment, but Mark found something touching--hopeful, even--in the way that Dan’s smiles were still just as wide and bright now as they were in old photographs of him from back when life was still something worth fighting for. That even the prominence of the circles framing his eyes and the sunkenness weighing down on his cheeks couldn’t dilute the amplitude of his laughter, couldn’t distract from the fact that the Dan Avidan before them was still every bit the man he’d used to be. Dan had refused to let the end of the world make him into a miserable caricature of himself.

Who _wouldn’t_ see something admirable, something tangibly awe-inspiring and encouraging in that?

What Dan had with music, Arin had with art.

His love affair with drawing had begun at an early age, as Mark knew good and well after years of having worked with him in a place where real creativity was rarer than the red-raw meat served in the cafeteria. His passion was much quieter than his boisterous personality, but it was just as bold and blatant if you only cared enough to look. Arin showed Mark all the sketchbooks he’d filled in just a year and a half of living full-time at Greenway the day he arrived. Some of the drawings within the worn, faded pages were simple gesticular doodles of his wife and his friends; some were sprawling landscapes etched in with bright colors and ornate artistic techniques. His pieces ranged from five-second dick drawings to fully shaded, cross-hatched portraits, from cartoonish comics to detailed yet almost-abstract still lifes. But no matter the amount of effort exerted or the level of skill evident in his diverging works, all of Arin’s drawings held something in common: each and every one of them reflected him better than any mirror could ever dream of doing. The thoughts in his head poured out onto the paper beneath his fingers in the form of ink and wax and graphite. He preserved himself in picturesque pages crafted from his own two hands, scrawled in his sketchbooks cover to cover the pitfalls and mountaintops of his identity. Art made him just as irrevocably as he made it. It was when he was drawing that Arin was at his most serene, and the plague that had been cursed upon mankind had failed to take that away from him. His humanity was forever etched in color along the expanses of a novel that contained no words, but told innumerable truths.

Truly, he had beat the apocalypse. He had won. Even if he were to die the very next day, it wouldn’t matter an iota. Arin had cheated the system. He’d found an eternity within a matter of minutes, among only a handful of his friends and family.

He’d found forever in the lead of his pencil, and he’d thrown away the eraser and never once looked back.

Put together, Dan and Arin were all kinds of unstoppable. They always seemed to be on the same brainwave, like God himself had meant for them to fall together in perfect synchronicity from the very start. They’d laugh together at unspoken jokes between themselves like a shared secret, something the others wouldn’t get even if they said it out loud, and they rarely ever needed words to understand each other. One look--one single, fleeting glance--and they knew what the other was thinking, what he was feeling, what he wouldn’t dare to say aloud. It was as though they were tied together by an invisible string of fate, physically bonded as one.

 _They were made for each other._ That’s how Vernon described it. They were made for each other the way the sun was made for the moon and the sea was made for the sky. They were symbiotic by every fathomable definition of the term.

It was really too bad that the world had had to end before they got the chance to meet one another.

It was Suzy and Dan and Arin who made Greenway House feel less and less like a sanctuary and more and more like home as the weeks wore into months, and the months into years. They were family, and they treated Mark as such, too, despite the fact that he was virtually a stranger to most of them. The hope that had been building in the pit of his chest ever since he arrived--warm and unrelenting and new, unlike anything he’d ever felt before, had ever thought he’d be able to feel again--he owed that hope to them.

And Mark fell in love with them. Fell quicker and easier than you could fall asleep. It was inevitable, like the turning of time towards the end of the line that awaits each and every one of us. It was inevitable, and he didn’t mind that one bit.

For the first time since the beginning of the end, Mark felt both safe and happy. It had been so long since he’d been that way. Had been so long since he’d had the carefree tranquility to look forward to watching a sunset or playing a board game. Had been so long since he’d had the time for friendship and could let go of the fear that everybody he would come to love was bound to be ripped away from him.

All he could do was pray that it might stay this way forever. All he could do was wish that he didn’t wake up tomorrow morning to find that it had all been some stupid keening dream.

All he could do was hope.

But then again, thanks to the survivors--the _family_ \--he’d been lucky enough to find at the renovated ruins of his old, abandoned workplace.

He was getting pretty damn good at hoping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not proud of this chapter AT ALL but if you liked it please leave a comment. In fact, if you hated it too, please leave a comment. Just leave a comment I'm seventeen and desperate for validation.

**Author's Note:**

> I am,,, a gay, sad woman,,, and I want,,,,, attention. Feed me comments.


End file.
